Consistent Differences in a Virtual World Model of Ape Societies

Authors

Bart J. Wilson, Chapman UniversityFollow
Sarah F. Brosnan, Georgia State University
Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf, Franklin and Marshall CollegeFollow
Crickette M. Sanz, Washington University in St. LouisFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-21-2020

Abstract

Practical and ethical constraints limit our ability to experimentally test socioecological theory in wild primates. We took an alternate approach to model this, allowing groups of humans to interact in a virtual world in which they had to find food and interact with both ingroup and outgroup avatars to earn rewards. We altered ratios and distributions of high- and low-value foods to test the hypothesis that hominoids vary with regards to social cohesion and intergroup tolerance due to their feeding ecology. We found larger nesting clusters and decreased attacks on outgroup competitors in the Bonobo condition versus the Chimpanzee condition, suggesting a significant effect of feeding competition alone on social structure. We also demonstrate that virtual worlds are a robust mechanism for testing hypotheses that are impossible to study in the wild.

Comments

This article was originally published in Scientific Reports, volume 10, in 2020. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-70955-6

The data that support the findings of this study are archived at Chapman University Digital Commons (https://doi.org/10.36837/chapman.000180).

Recommended Citation

Wilson, B.J., Brosnan, S.F., Lonsdorf, E.V., & Sanz, C. M. (2020). Consistent differences in a virtual world model of ape societies. Scientific Reports, 10, 14075. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-70955-6

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.